Dr. Cargill Challenges Jim West’s Sloppy Rhetoric

April 12, 2013

All bibliobloggers should take a few moments to read Dr. Cargill’s latest article. I believe supporting the suppression of the denied civil rights of other human beings (in the public sector) is wrong: morally and ethically reprehensible.

I also believe that fideism in academic, theological, ethical, and philosophical circles– and even the internet–should always be challenged: even if it’s from a friend; and especially if it is supported by a series of logical fallacies. As Dr. Cargill rightly points out it is “sloppy rhetoric”… and fideism is probably the laziest and least convincing argument I know of in any sort of debate.

Bob does a good job of demonstrating this. Below is a snippet, but please, go to his site and read the entire piece.

I want my friend to change his opinion on same-sex marriage. I want him to see the beam in his own eye – the inconsistency of his hermeneutic – that everyone else so clearly sees. I want him to see that using an appeal to the revelatory nature of the Bible to suppress the civil (not religious, but civil) rights and privileges of LGBTQ individuals is just as wrong as when it was done to slaves in the 1860s and to women in the early 1900s. I want him to stop posting embarrassing (and to many, offensive) comparisons between homosexuality and criminal activities like polygamy and pedophilia, and lumping them all together by arguing, “insofar as they are deviations, they are similar.” Such comments are not worthy of scholars and professionals, but are instead what we have come to expect from many fundamentalist preachers and politicians. I want my friend to change his scholarly opinion, and I want him to stop attacking the beliefs (or non-beliefs) of other scholars making valid points. Again, such sloppy rhetoric is not worthy of scholars.